Plum Radio

Dolly and Joey spend the last day before the November 2020 election discussing our anxieties and reading a selection of responses from our beloved listeners. On your minds this week: Poll intimidation, civil war, and...Vin Diesel's new music career. Salud, mi familia. 

Comedian, actor, and writer Jenny Yang joins us this week to talk Comedy Crossing, her new standup show inside the game Animal Crossing. Jenny started Comedy Crossing after the pandemic as a way to build community in our quarantined world, but in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Comedy Crossing became a fundraising platform that has raised over $30,000 for Black Lives Matter related causes. But as journalists, we’re obligated to ask the hard questions: is playing Animal Crossing an act of colonization?? Do we accept tiny, cute capitalism? And do Animal Crossing players (like the Biden / Harris campaign) owe reparations?

We also get into Jenny’s past life as a labor organizer, how labor organizing and comedy can both deliver a political education, and why it’s so important for Asian Americans to embrace our messy, traumatic histories so we can take care of our mental health and reject the model minority myth at the same time.

Dolly and Joey also lament the “meritocracy” of mediocre rich white people, reacting in real-time to Amy Coney Barrett’s Monday night confirmation to the Supreme Court and unpacking the Atlantic’s recent article “The Mad, Mad World of Niche Sports Among Ivy League–Obsessed Parents.”

Read “The Mad, Mad World of Niche Sports Among Ivy League–Obsessed Parents”: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/squash-lacrosse-niche-sports-ivy-league-admissions/616474/

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We pride ourselves on being independent media at Plum Radio. Follow us on IG (@listentoplumradio), and support us on Patreon (patreon.com/plumradio) if you’re here for the culture and believe in independent media.

Whitney Hu is an activist, abolitionist, mutual aid organizer, and candidate for NYC city council District 38. Whitney is one of the organizers of South Brooklyn Mutual Aid and an activist who has fought rezonings that would have continued to gentrify her neighborhood. Now, she’s merging her desire to burn the system down with her demand for stronger representation from her elected officials. What does abolition mean in practice, especially in electoral politics? How can we “dreamscape” to create alternatives to police and jails? Can the revolutionary desires of abolition really work within the system? And are abolitionists’ demands actually unreasonable?

Plum Radio listener LG also writes in about Peter Hessler’s New Yorker article “9 Days In Wuhan” to ask what about China allowed them to get on with their lives so quickly. Dolly and Joey have a nuanced discussion on socialism in other nations, how working people are disposable under capitalism, the real truth exposed by Ai Weiwei’s COVID documentary, Coronation, and how censorship may actually make Chinese citizens…*less* susceptible to disinformation (...and more likely...TO THINK FOR THEMSELVES??).

As always, write in to us at [email protected] with what’s on your mind or leave us a voicemail on IG through our DMs @listentoplumradio.

Read Peter Hessler’s “Nine Days in Wuhan, the Ground Zero of the Coronavirus Pandemic”: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/10/12/nine-days-in-wuhan-the-ground-zero-of-the-coronavirus-pandemic

Watch Ai Weiwei’s Coronation: https://www.aiweiwei.com/coronation

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We pride ourselves on being independent media at Plum Radio. Follow us on IG (@listentoplumradio), and support us on Patreon (patreon.com/plumradio) if you’re here for the culture and believe in independent media.

Video journalist Isabelle Niu joins us to talk about the pending WeChat ban and her Quartz video “Is WeChat a Problem for Democracies?” With so much talk around banning Chinese apps like WeChat and TikTok and China’s recent expulsion of American journalists, our tiny window into China is quickly closing. Isabelle tells us how WeChat provides insight into what the Chinese government is signaling and into the lives of WeChat’s 1 billion users. What are the consequences of not understanding Chinese society and politics? How will alienating China affect diaspora communities? We also talk to Isabelle about Loud Murmurs, our favorite left-leaning Mandarin language podcast that unpacks foreign culture and media to better understand what it means to be Chinese.

Dolly and Joey also atone for Indigenous People’s day sins by proposing to rename Columbus, OH to Flavortown, OH, give a 🚨 MILES GUO ALERT 🚨 about the fight he’s picking with Texas pastor Bob Fu and Big Jesus, and bless the show with an NBA title for Flavortown’s very own LeBron James.

Watch “Is WeChat a Problem for Democracies?”: youtube.com/watch?v=Lrn5in0iBd8

Listen to Loud Murmurs: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/loud-murmurs-%E5%B0%8F%E5%A3%B0%E5%96%A7%E5%93%97/id1355583279

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We pride ourselves on being independent media at Plum Radio. Follow us on IG (@listentoplumradio), and support us on Patreon (patreon.com/plumradio) if you’re here for the culture and believe in independent media.

The new cold war is here, and the U.S. and China are fighting it online. Writer and former tech worker JS Tan joins us to discuss the growingly more divided “splinternet,” Silicon Valley’s facade of freedom for the sake of global dominance, and how the U.S. is recreating China’s protectionist internet policies. We also talk about how this new cold war will endanger Asian diaspora, and how movements like China’s anti-996 movement and rideshare driver revolts show that maybe the two sides of the splinternet aren’t so different after all.

Dolly and Joey also read this week’s listener mailbag about the new trailer for the film Minari and discuss what it means to have good and bad Asian American representation.

Read JS’s argument, “Big Tech Embraces New Cold War Nationalism” in Foreign Policy: https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/27/china-tech-facebook-google/

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We pride ourselves on being independent media at Plum Radio. Follow us on IG (@listentoplumradio), and support us on Patreon (patreon.com/plumradio) if you’re here for the culture and believe in independent media.

Yi Chen, the director of the new documentary film First Vote, joins us to discuss making a film about first-time Asian American voters on both sides of the political spectrum and digs into why recent Chinese immigrants fear socialism so much that they end up becoming Trump supporters.

Dolly and Joey also did their first *mailbag* episode where we responded to questions from YOU, our beloved audience and listeners. Dolly shares her tips on how to pull back from the news cycle, Joey talks about how he turns on Do Not Disturb mode at 5pm. We also discuss Donald Trump’s tax evasion and ponder how many cod had to die for Mr. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson to cast a vote for Joe Biden. Write to us! We respond to listener questions every Monday night on IG Live: [email protected]

We watched First Vote with our Patreon subscribers and had Yi drop in for an intimate discussion after the viewing party. We host exclusive screening events and monthly Q&As for just our Plum Posse on Patreon so make sure you subscribe today for less than the price of a movie ticket over at patreon.com/plumradio.

And for pure giggles and context for the show, we insist you read, “My Real-Time Response To Learning What The Rock Eats Every Day” by Daniel Mallory Ortberg: https://the-toast.net/2015/04/03/my-real-time-response-to-learning-what-the-rock-eats-every-day/

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We pride ourselves on being independent media at Plum Radio. Follow us on IG (@listentoplumradio), and support us on Patreon (patreon.com/plumradio) if you’re here for the culture and want to be part of the vision

“Remote learning is very hard. Nobody wants to do it. Every single kid in the world is losing out on an education.”

Annie Tan, a New York City public school teacher, joins us again on Plum Radio to talk about how teachers and communities are organizing and fighting back against the city’s unsafe plans to reopen schools.

New York City, home to the country’s largest public school system with more than ONE MILLION students, has already delayed schools reopening twice, leaving families, educators, and students stuck in limbo. Many NYC schools have neither proper ventilation nor bathrooms for COVID-19 safety precautions, let alone the technology needed to teach remote classrooms. As Annie tells us, at her school in the immigrant neighborhood of Sunset Park, they don’t even have a dedicated nurse, a role that they’ve been requesting long before COVID-19.

Will it be safe to re-open schools in the U.S. epicenter of the COVID-19 crisis? Who is pushing the narrative that low income students of color need to attend school in-person the most? And where will schools find the funding to fix school infrastructure, provide remote learning devices, offer child care services to educators who have to return to work, and find enough employees to staff both remote and in-person classes?

For more Annie, tune in to Plum Radio Ep. 3, where she shares the memory of her late cousin, Vincent Chin.

Dolly and Joey also discuss why blindly celebrating the ban on WeChat is actually racist and the new expose about forced hysterectomies in ICE detention centers.

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We pride ourselves on being independent media at Plum Radio. Follow us on IG (@listentoplumradio), and support us on Patreon (patreon.com/plumradio) if you’re here for the culture and believe in independent media.

We watched Mulan this week...and we are spilling some hot hot tea over it 🤠 🍵

Tony Lin, a Chinese American journalist who has written pop culture analyses for publications on both sides of the firewall, joins us to drag Disney’s 2020 remake across the Silk Road.

What is the Han ethnic identity, and what does Disney’s “Han-washing” of Mulan’s character have to do with this movie’s filming in Xinjiang? Is Mulan a feminist movie? Is Hollywood’s strategy of pandering to China working? And how many white people does it take to serve this fresh new dish of orientalism? (Spoiler alerts, obviously.)

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We pride ourselves on being independent media at Plum Radio. Follow us on IG (@listentoplumradio), and support us on Patreon (patreon.com/plumradio) if you’re here for the culture and want to be part of the vision.

What’s it like to live in China as a Latinx American woman? We sat down this week with Ashley Almanzar, who spent the last five years living in Ningbo, China, working in education and launching her own business, The Ning Box (IG: @theningbox_), which curates events for expats and locals in the Ningbo area.

We talked to Ashley about how you can live a version of the American dream with affordable healthcare and rent under $500, policing in China vs the U.S. (have YOU ever seen a cop get punched?), how people living in China get news about Xinjiang, and white male expat privilege (hole emoji).

Dolly and Joey also try to restoke the flames of the short-lived NBA players strike and put LeBron and Obama into the same hole and bless the California man who helped put out the wildfires...with Bud Light.

Listen to episode 20 now wherever you like to podcast! And for another episode where we talk about the difference in policing in China and the U.S., check out episode 11 with Bohan Phoenix, “Cultural Appropriation or Not?”

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We pride ourselves on being independent media at Plum Radio. Follow us on IG (@listentoplumradio), and support us on Patreon (patreon.com/plumradio) if you’re here for the culture and want to be part of the vision.